Making sense of this crazy world
I am a student of history, a teacher of history and a writer of history. You could say history is a passion of mine. I have a website for students and I had been mulling around this idea of a podcast for some time. Would people be interested? Would I make it interesting? That’s essentially what was holding me back. But with a new year starting, the craziness still all around us, I thought what the hell – give it a go, John! The primary purpose of the podcast is to use history to help us make a little more sense of this crazy world we are living in. I aim to do this by using history. It’s not the only tool to be used, but it is my chosen tool. Everything happens in a context and that context is recent history. But that recent history is almost always the result of older history. We have to go back into our past to understand today. I could easily rattle off a hundred other aims but trust me, they will be introduced as we go along. But there are two other aims I must own up to straight away. The first is that I really want to lay it on the line that history is always about people. I think it was the great historian, Eric Hobsbawm who said unemployment is an economic statistic but a human experience. And you can’t appear to be further away from people than with dry statistics – but you’re not. And the second is that there is always more than one story to tell; more than one “truth”. History is an interpretation of the past, nothing more. There are always other interpretations. When we look at this crazy world of ours today and try to make sense of what is happening, it is so important to bear that in mind - someone else thinks differently. And if we don’t understand that other interpretation, if we don’t even know it exists, then we can’t reach an understanding of what is happening. And our truth is less secure! I hope that makes sense.
Listen on:
Episodes
4 days ago
4 days ago
I’m looking at the Kurds today, the largest ethnic group in the world without a home to call its own. That fact alone makes it necessary for us to know something about their history, I think. Well, this is the first of two episodes doing that.
Sunday May 04, 2025
Sunday May 04, 2025
This episode sets out to explain the reasons behind the schism in the Islamic world between Sunnis and Shi'ites or Shias, as well as the consequences of the schism.
Sunday Apr 27, 2025
Sunday Apr 27, 2025
A final episode on Syria taking a look at the consequences of the civil war, most importantly on people but also on the politics of the region.
Sunday Apr 20, 2025
Sunday Apr 20, 2025
I don’t want to plot the path of the war so much (though there will inevitably be a bit of that), rather I want to focus on the nature of it, its characteristics, so that we can better understand its significance today.
Sunday Apr 13, 2025
Sunday Apr 13, 2025
For a very brief period, Bashar seemed to offer a liberal regime but he soon revived the authoritarian tactics of his late father’s administration. It would eventually lead to protests, that became an uprising or a revolution, and eventually a civil war; and that’s what our focus is for this episode.
Sunday Apr 06, 2025
Sunday Apr 06, 2025
Hafez Assad moved Syria ever closer to the Soviet Union (and then lost it). And he set out to position Syria as a regional power and himself as the leader of the Arab world, filling the vacuum left by Nasser, and that meant taking on Israel (or at least at first it did), it also meant rivalry with Saddam Hussein, and, as we have seen, it meant interfering in the Lebanon Civil War and, indeed, its occupation of Lebanon (so I won’t revisit that). But all this also meant that, one way or another, whether he wanted it or not, there would be a relationship with America.
Sunday Mar 30, 2025
Sunday Mar 23, 2025
Sunday Mar 23, 2025
The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime took us all by surprise. The armed coalition, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), put an end to over fifty years of the Assad family’s rule of Syria. And I want to explore how first Hafez al-Assad, and then Bashar al-Assad, got to power and what they did in power. In other words, how did we get to where we are today?
Sunday Mar 16, 2025
Sunday Mar 16, 2025
A peaceful, people-led, revolution against Syrian occupation, Hezbollah attacks on Israel and another Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
With the Israeli’s and the Christian Maronites both eager to cement their relationship and control Syria, and with Syria determined that they should be the leading player in Lebanon and so be the leading player in the Arab world’s settlement with Israel, and with the root of the problem – the question of a Palestinian state – unresolved – nothing was settled in Lebanon. Far from it.